Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds—Tender Prey

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds—Tender Prey

Tender Prey—The late 1980s were a busy time for Nick Cave. He and the Bad Seeds appeared in Der Himmel über Berlin as themselves, playing "The Carny" from their latest album, Your Funeral... My Trial (1986), he co-wrote the script and music of and starred in Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, and published both a book of collected works (King Ink, named for the Birthday Party song) and a novel (And the Ass Saw the Angel). The stress from all of it plus steady recording and touring took its toll on Cave and the band. Interviews from that time period paint Cave as paranoid, drug-addled, and nasty, and while some of it was certainly editorialization, Cave's long affair with heroin has been documented. Thus, Tender Prey came out messy, but ironically, it produced some of the band's most iconic songs.

Cave played a prison inmate in Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, and so being in that mindset wrote a number of prison songs for Tender Prey, though the subject was not entirely new for the band, whose prior album The Firstborn Is Dead (1985) was influenced by outlaw country. One of these songs is Cave's signature song, "The Mercy Seat," which is presented here in its original extended format, played at nearly every Bad Seeds concert since its creation. It's almost impossible to distinguish the instruments from one another at first—the ongoing march of Thomas Wydler's drums is surrounded by the weeping strings and Blixa Bargeld's barely audible slide guitar, occasionally flooded by Mick Harvey's and new member Roland Wolf's murderous guitar leads—to say nothing of Cave's lyrics, which make at least one offhanded reference to And the Ass Saw the Angel (or perhaps vice-versa) and depict a Christ-like figure who is set to die in the electric chair. The creepily sultry "Up Jumped the Devil" is quintessential Cave ("My blood was blacker than the chambers of a dead nun's heart") that takes its name either from Robert Johnson's "Preachin' Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)" or the lyrics to "The Devil Went down to Georgia" (likely the former, considering Tender Prey's heavy blues context).

Bad Seeds standard "Deanna" is a reworking of "Oh Happy Day," which is better exemplified by the acoustic version that was later appended as a bonus 7" to The Good Son (1990). Its unclear story combines crass sex with crass murder; in live shows, Cave sings with more venom: "She was my fuckin' friend/She was my fuckin' partner," making it sound scornful rather than jaunty. "Watching Alice" is something of a murky failure, whose languid arrangement is even less interesting than the banal lyrics. The toiling "Mercy" is one of the better forgotten Bad Seeds songs, as is "City of Refuge," based on Blind Willie Johnson's "(I'm Gonna Run to) the City of Refuge" (itself based on the traditional "You Better Run"). "Slowly Goes the Night" is a quiet highlight, sending up schlock balladry Bad Seeds-style while retaining a certain charm in spite of itself. The clopping "Sunday's Slave" and onrush of "Sugar Sugar Sugar" are two of the album's more understated moments, although the former is stronger than that suggests. The waning drunkenness of "New Morning" bids farewell to the hellish themes of the album and foreshadows the direction of The Good Son.

The first phase of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' career (pre-The Boatman's Call [1997]) is often referred to as Cave's Old Testament period; never was that more fitting than with Tender Prey (Birthday Party albums aside). Although it's a messy record, and many of the songs were not performed or arranged optimally, as a sort of blueprint, it's rather solid. Some of the group's (and the Birthday Party's) earlier work was unfavorably circumspect, and the relative straightforwardness of Tender Prey was refreshing. It's not the best LP of that aforementioned period, but it's close, and it was the most rock and roll the band ever got during the Blixa Bargeld era.

More Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds reviews by The Old Noise:

From Her to Eternity (1984)
The Firstborn Is Dead (1985)
Kicking Against the Pricks (1986)
Your Funeral... My Trial (1986)
Tender Prey (1988)
The Good Son (1990)
Henry's Dream (1992)
Live Seeds (1993)
Let Love In (1994)
Murder Ballads (1996)
The Boatman's Call (1997)
No More Shall We Part (2001)
Nocturama (2003)
Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (2004)
Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008)
Push the Sky Away (2013)